the war on science: climate change skeptics and the ... · adapted from pittock, a.b. (2009)...

CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL AND THE CULTURE OF SCIENTIFIC SKEPTICISM

Kira ClingenHarvard Energy Journal ClubOctober 6, 2017

NASA USDoSThe Nation

PRESENTATION STRUCTURE

1. Terminology2. James Hansen, Congress, and the American public3. Types of Deniers4. Types of Denial Arguments5. Postmodernism, Public Opinion and Perception6. Scientific Skepticism

SKEPTICISM OR DENIAL – OR BULVERISM?

MisterDavidC: Flickr Creative Commons

SKEPTICISM

• Skepticism: seeking truth within the realization that the world is a complex place

• Apply critical faculties to both sides of an argument

• Admit uncertainties • Risk management may require

appropriate responses regardless of uncertainties (skepticism)

Adapted from Pittock, A.B. (2009) Climate Change: The Science, Impacts and solutions, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, Australia

Team Kweeper via Flickr Creative Commons

DENIAL

• Denial: Refusal to believe something no matter the evidence

• Demonstrate ‘willful ignorance’ and use logical fallacies to maintain unshakeable beliefs

Marc via Flickr Creative Commons

Adapted from Washington, H. and J. Cook. (2011) Climate Change Denial – Heads in the Sand. Routeledge, New York, New York.

BULVERISM

• Bulverism: avoids need to prove that someone is wrong by first assuming they are wrong, then explaining why they hold their (wrong) view

Hamilton, C. (2010) Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, Australia

JAMES HANSEN AND THE AMERICAN PUBLIC• Testified to Congress in 1988

• First time lead scientist shared connection between human activities, atmospheric pollutants and warming climate

• Brought anthropogenic climate change from a purely scientific realm to public sphere

• 1998 79% of American public believed in anthropogenic climate change

• Inaccuracy in model touted by climate change deniers

Hansen, J. et al. (1988). “Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three-dimensional model.” J. Geophys. Res., 93, 9341-9364

TYPES OF DENIERS: GENERAL

Rensburg, W.V. (2015) “Climate Change Skepticism: A Conceptual Re-Evaluation,” SAGE Open 5(2): 1-13.

SKEPTIC DEMOGRAPHICS• Political ideology most highly

correlates to skepticism regarding climate change

• Watching Fox News regularly• Strongly valuing private

property rights• Free market ideology• Strongly supporting hierarchies• Conservative Protestants

• Social, demographic and ideological variables less telling

McCright, A. M., (2016) Anti-Reflexivity and Climate Change Skepticism in the US General Public Human Ecology Review

Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Rosenthal, S., & Cutler, M. (2017). Climate change in the American mind Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

COMMUNICATION AND CONSENSUS

Maibach, E., C. Roser-Renouf, and A. Leiserowitz. (2012) Global warming’s six Americas in 2012. New Haven, CT: Yale Project on Climate Change, Yale University and George Mason University.

COMMUNICATION AND CONSENSUS

Brian Shreck & Arnold Vedlitz (2016) The Public and Its Climate: Exploring the Relationship Between Public Discourse and Opinion on Global Warming, Society & Natural Resources, 29:5, 509-524


CLIMATE CAST

• Minnesota Public Radio News Climate Cast weekly show:• “You have to look smaller, and be more specific. It’s in the specificity

that you get away from the broad-brush politics, and it also makes it much more interesting for your audience. There’s just so much to talk about the real science – the effects on the economy and people’s lives – that we don’t need to take the ‘Is it really happening’ question. That’s been solved. It’s easy to use the conflict frame, that’s too easy.” –Stephanie Curtis, senior producer of Climate Cast

Interview between Sean Lawrence Otto and Stephanie Curtis, September 2016

JUST WORLD BELIEF• Participants primed to have a

stronger belief in a just world• Levels of skepticism 29% higher• Willingness to reduce carbon

footprint: 21% lower• “These results demonstrate how

dire messages warning of the severity of global warming and its presumed dangers can backfire, paradoxically increasing skepticism about global warming by contradicting individuals’ deeply held beliefs that the world is fundamentally just.”

Feinberg, M. and Willer, R. (2011) “Apocalypse Soon? Dire Messages Reduce Belief in Global Warming by Contradicting Just World Beliefs.” Psychological Science 22(1): 34-38.

Carla Lombardo Ehrlich for NYT

TYPES OF DENIERS: SCIENTISTS1. Outright deniers: IPCC is a fraud

and climate scientists are fools2. Combative confrontationalists:

automatically adopt position in opposition to any general consensus

3. Professional controversialists: keen to seek recognition by being part of prominent discourse

4. Conflicted naysayers who work closely with industry

Doherty, P. (2009) “Climate change and beyond skeptical thinking.” The Monthly, 51.

TYPES OF DENIAL ARGUMENT

Rensburg, W.V. (2015) “Climate Change Skepticism: A Conceptual Re-Evaluation,” SAGE Open 5(2): 1-13.

TYPES OF DENIAL ARGUMENT

1. Conspiracy theories (Process – scientific knowledge and generation)

2. Fake experts (Process – scientific knowledge and generation) 3. Impossible expectations of what research can offer (Process –

scientific knowledge and generation) 4. Misrepresentation and logical fallacies (Process – climate

decision making processes)5. Cherry-picking (Process – scientific knowledge and

generation)

Diethelm and McKee, 2009

1. CONSPIRACY THEORIES: CLIMATEGATE

• November 2009 email hacking at the University of East Anglia in Britain

• “I’ve just completed Mike’s Naturetrick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” – Phil Jones

• “The emails reveal that that leading climate ‘experts’ deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures.” – Sarah Palin

Adapted from Mann, M. (2012) The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

2. FAKE EXPERTS• The Petition Project: 31,000

people with BSc or higher signed petition rejecting human-caused global warming

• 0.1% climatologists• Dr. Wei-Hock Soon paid $1.2

million; failed to disclose funding in 11 papers

• Conservative think tank publications: Climate Change: The Facts 2017 OISM

2.5 EXPERTS

Responses from 2009 Gallup Poll: “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”

Doran, P. and M. Zimmerman. (2009) ‘ Examining the scientific consensus on climate change’, Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, 90 (3):22-23. www.skepticalscience.com

3. IMPOSSIBLE EXPECTATIONS

• Climatic modeling inaccuracies and variability

• Atmospheric influences (Mount Pinatubo)

• Lack of understanding of scientific process

• Impact skepticism: wait until 100% confidence to act

The Guardian

4. MISREPRESENTATION AND LOGICAL FALLACIES• Most common process denial

argument• “Climate change has changed

naturally in the past. Current climate change is normal.”

• Ignores climate sensitivity and net feedback

NASA

5. CHERRY PICKING

• Climate change stopped in 1998: HadCRUT temperature record

• Critique of Mann’s “hockey stick” methods

• “It’s the sun!” • Site selection for temperature

recording


5.5 CHERRY PICKING IN EVERY CLIMATE• Increased growing season in

Greenland • Increased productivity of sour

orange trees • Winter deaths will decline as

temperatures warm • Increased plankton biomass i

n the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre

• Bigger marmots • Increased Arctic tundra plant

reproduction • Increased cod fishing leading

to improved Greenland economy

• Increase in chinstrap and gentoo penguins


TYPES OF DISTORTION• Outright lies – IPCC ignores saturation of carbon dioxide as concentration

increases• Twisting phrasing – mostly arises from using correct quotes, but then

seeks to mislead readers• Removing qualifiers – no close correlation becomes no correlation• Bait and switch – true proposition used to imply similar sounding but false

proposition• Guilt by association – climate scientists are too liberal or Marxist• Misrepresenting nature of evidence ‘for’ vs. ‘against’ – inconclusive nature

of some particular evidence used to reject large body of evidence that supports issue

• Raising true but irrelevant ‘facts’- rising sea levels create coral reefs• Assembling petitions – Oregon Petition denying climate change

Enting, I. (2007) Twisted: The Distorted Mathematics of Greehouse Denial, Australasian Mathematical Sciences Institute, Melbourne, Australia

CLIMATE CHANGE AS A SCIENTIFIC OFFENSE

NYT, Life Magazine, Life Magazine

MORAL DILEMMA OF COLLECTIVE ACTION• Global

• Dispersion of emissions (causes and effects) • Institutional inadequacy• Spatial fragmentation of agency

• Existing unequal power networks

• Intergenerational• Delayed effects• Temporally fragmented agency• Intergenerational collective action

• Theoretical• Moral corruption• Theoretical ineptitude

Gardiner, S.M. (2011) Climate Change: A Perfect Moral Storm. Oxford University Press, New York, New York.

Wikipedia

POSTMODERNISM• Objectivity cannot exist

• Many subjective realities on par with objective reality• Rejects idea of reality and facts that exist without our thinking about them• Enriches number of minority and alternative opinions• “Multiculturalism = relativism = no supercollider = communism”

– E.O. Wilson

• “Relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society or so [the students] see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged – a combination of disbelief and indignation.”

– Allan Bloom, University of Chicago

“Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”• Alan Sokal published in

postmodern journal Social Text in 1980s

• Mashup of postmodernist writing claiming that “recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ‘objectivity.’”

• Published hoax in Lingua Franca soon after

Social Text

THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn:

science is not the gradual and painstaking accumulation of knowledge

• Inherently powerful, therefore political• “The world, including the world of science, is a complex and

scattered entity that cannot be captured by theories and simple rules. Nor is there any way of knowing, science; there are many such ways, and before they were ruined by Western civilization they were effective in the sense that they kept people alive and made their existence comprehensible. The material benefits of science are not at all obvious.” – Paul Feyerabend

LUCKY STRIKE’S LUCKY BREAK

Origins of Propaganda• Edward Bernay’s 1929 Easter

Day Parade display for the American Tobacco Company

• Later published Propaganda• Third party technique: public

is skeptical if they know they are being manipulated

• Same methods used in contemporary scientific denial

The Guardian

APCO, TASSC AND JUNK SCIENCE• Tobacco company Philip Morris

hired PR firm APCO • Founded The Advancement for

Sound Science Coalition (TAASC) in1994

• Broader comments on government research and regulations

• Global warming, nuclear waste disposal, biotechnology

• “A national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of ‘junk science’… upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will begin media outreach, for example editorial board tours, opinion articles and brief elected officials in selected states.”

– APCO initial report on formation of TAASC

Monbiot, G. (2006) Heat: how to Stop the Planet Burning, Penguin Books, London

GLOBAL CLIMATE COALITION AND INDUSTRY POSITIONING Communication plan: “We will have achieved victory when”1. Average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science;

recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom”2. Media “understands” uncertainties in climate science3. Media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of

validity of viewpoints that challenge current wisdom4. Industry senior leadership understands uncertainties, making them

stronger ambassadors to those who shape climate policy5. Those promoting the Kyoto treaty on basis of extant science appear to be

out of touch with reality

Otto, S.L. (2016) The War on Science. Milkweed Editions, New York, New York

FCC AND FAIRNESS DOCTRINE

• 1949 Fairness Doctrine accompanied mainstream television• Controversial issues of public importance: presented in honest, equitable and

balanced way• Repealed 1987

• Reduced goal of objectivity in democratic society• Increased partisan public dialogue

• Marketplace of emotions, not ideas

Otto, S.L. (2016) The War on Science. Milkweed Editions, New York, New York

CLIMATE SKEPTIC ORGANIZATIONS

Boussalis, C. and Coan, T. (2016) “Text-mining the signals of climate change doubt,” Global Environmental Change 36: 89-100

CLIMATE SKEPTIC THEMES

1. Domestic and international policies

2. Energy and emissions3. Science4. Scientific Integrity5. Policy and Regulation


SHIFT FROM SCIENCE TO POLICY DENIAL


ANTI-REFLEXIVITY THESIS AND THE RISE OF IMPACT SKEPTICISM• Climate change deniers seen as a collective force defending the

industrial capitalist system against claims that the system causes serious problems

• Recent shift moves beyond the existence or anthropogenic causes of climate change to the necessary (or unnecessary) actions to combat climate change

• Binding regulations framed as harming the economy and threatening individual freedoms

• “Economy versus ecology” and tying into an anti-environmentalist discourse

McCright, A. M., (2016) Anti-Reflexivity and Climate Change Skepticism in the US General Public Human Ecology Review

PUBLIC OPINION ON SCIENTISTS BELIEF IN CLIMATE CHANGE


CHALLENGES OF SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION• “It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming

and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes. The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policymakers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists.”

– Doran and Zimmerman

Doran, P. and Zimmerman, M. (2009) “Examining the scientific consensus on climate change.” Eos Trans, American Geophysical Union, 90(3): 22

the war on science: climate change skeptics and the ... · adapted from pittock, a.b. (2009)...

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